If, indeed, every word is brought to God, one can imagine the last great gathering of the sermons of all ages replying to one issue: Which sermons really counted?
—Calvin Miller
The book of Jonah is the tale of a reluctant preacher. Jonah’s message, as we have come to know it, is: “Yet forty days, and Nineveh shall be overthrown” (Jonah 3:4 kjv).
A brief eight words. Surely there is more: some clever and imaginative introduction lost in the oral manuscript. There must have been iterations, poetry, and exegesis. But they are gone, and those eight words are all we know.
Such a miniature message seems anticlimactic. Even the king of Nineveh had more to say than Jonah (see vv. 7-9). But the lost sermon was preached and bore a stern word of necessity. Verse 10 states its effect: “And God saw their works, that they turned from their evil way; and God repented of the evil, that he had said that he would do unto them; and he did it not” (kjv).
The results of sermons in the Bible seem to be of great importance. This is true of either Testament. Acts 2:40-41 speaks of the dramatic results of Peter’s Pentecostal sermon, and a few days later we are told, “Howbeit many of them which heard the word believed; and the number of the men was about five thousand” (Acts 4:4 kjv). While Jonah omits the statistics of his sermon, Luke was careful to note Simon’s.
Preaching in the New Testament seems to emulate the authoritative style of the Old Testament prophets. Ever cloaked in the otherworldly authority, preaching became the vehicle the early church rode into the arena of evangelizing the Roman Empire. As common people of Galilee once marveled at Christ’s authority in the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 7:28-29), so the authority of Scripture-based sermons became the defense—sometimes the sole defense—of the men and women who pressed the strong alternative of the gospel.
No time to waste
From John the Baptist to the end of the New Testament era, the sermon, like the church itself, flamed with apocalyptic zeal. The prophets had preached strong declarations of the direction of God in history. Following Pentecost, the sermon was possessed of a new spiritual union, where the preacher and the Holy Spirit were joined. The sermon, like Scripture, was dictated by the Spirit. Because of a direct alliance with the Trinity, the preacher had the right to speak with God’s authority, demanding immediate action and visible decisions. This “right-now” ethic saw the sermon in terms of the demand of God. When God demanded decisions, they could be tabulated as soon as the sermon was finished. Sheep could immediately be divided from goats.
The specific message was delivered by those who possessed the call. The rules of primitive homiletics were not defined. The sermon was the man; the medium, the message. The product was instant and visible. Faith could be tabulated by those who cried in the streets that they believed, admitted to baptism, and showed up for the breaking of bread and prayers.
Following the first head counts in Jerusalem, the fire of evangelism spread, pushed on by the hot winds of Greek and Aramaic sermons. Congregations sprang up as sermons called them into being. Without institutional structure, programs, or buildings, the church celebrated the simple center of worship—the sermon and that which the sermon created: the company of the committed, the fellowship of believers.
The sermon was not celebrated as art, though doubtless, art may have been an aspect of delivery. Art was not so important in the panicky apocalypticism of Century One. Zeal raged in the bright light of Pentecost, not art. The sermon was the means of reaching the last, desperate age of humanity. One needed not to polish phrases or study word roots—the kingdom was at hand—there wasn’t time to break ground for a seminary. Church administration went begging. On the eve of Armageddon, committees and bureaus were unimportant. There was only one point to be made. All human wisdom was one set of alternatives: repent or perish.
This was also Jonah’s sermon: repent or perish. Like those of the New Testament era, his was not a notable document. The sermon was the workhorse of urgent evangelism.
Jonah’s sermon was powerful simply because it was not ornate. He who cries “fire” in a theater need not be an orator. Indeed, he is allowed to interrupt the art of actors. It is not an offense to the years of disciplined training to be set aside for the urgent and unadorned word: “The theater is on fire!” The bearer rates his effectiveness on how fast the theater is cleared, not on the ovation of the customers. The alarmist is not out for encores but empty seats. His business is rescue.
The book of Jonah concerns such reluctant and apocalyptic preaching. The royal family sitting at last in the ashes of national repentance illustrates how effective his urgency was.
This zealous declaration is the Word of God as it is preached today in growing churches. Those who would speak an artistic word must do it in churches already built. Further, those who admire the Fosdicks and Maclarens—and they are to be admired—must see that their artistry would be passed by in the slums of London, where Booth’s drums and horns sounded not a “trumpet voluntary” to call men and women to the queen’s chapel but the “oom-pah-pah” of the Cross. “Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?” was an urgent question that nauseated Anglicans even as it intrigued the poor and downtrodden of England with its zealous demands.
What did Booth say? Who knows? Who cares?
What did Whitefield say? What Billy Sunday? What Finney, what Wesley, what Mordecai Ham? To be sure, some of their sermons survive. But essentially they viewed their preaching not in the Chrysostom tradition but the tradition of the Baptizer of Christ: “O generation of vipers, who hath warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance” (Luke 3:7-8 kjv), or Simon Peter, who cried, “Save yourselves from this untoward generation” (Acts 2:40 kjv).
The coming of art
Here and there were men like Jonathan Edwards who combined the best of literary tradition and apocalyptic zeal. But there was a real sense in which Edwards, the Mathers, and the other Puritans supplied a pre-soap-opera generation with a cultural center. The better their apocalypse, the higher the otherworld fever of their gospel contagion. Their fiery tirades began to resemble the spirit of a matador, and the amens were the enthusiastic oles, where the champion was not Jehovah but the preacher. Kate Caffrey writes in The Mayflower:
A strong style was favored—in 1642 John Cotton recommended preaching after the manner of Christ, who, he said, “let fly poynt blanck”—and the hearers judged each performance like professional drama critics. Two sermons on Sunday and a lecture-sermon or weeknight meeting, usually on Thursday, were the custom, with fines of up to five shillings for absence from church. Only those who wished need go to the weeknight sermon, which was accompanied by no prayers or other teaching. Yet they were so popular in the sixteen-thirties that the General Court of Massachusetts tried to make every community hold them on the same day, to cut down all the running about from one town to the next. The preachers protested that it was in order to hear sermons that people had come to New England, so the court contented itself with the mild recommendation that listeners should at least be able to get home before dark.
Even condemned criminals joined in the vogue for sermons. On March 11, 1686, when James Morgan was executed in Boston, three sermons were preached to him by Cotton and Increase Mather and Joshua Moody (so many came to hear Moody that their combined weight cracked the church gallery), and the prisoner delivered from the scaffold a stern warning to all present to take heed from his dread example.
Sermons were so important that it is impossible to overestimate them. Hourglasses, set up by the minister, showed the sermons’ length: a bare hour was not good enough. People brought paper and inkhorns to take copious notes in a specially invented shorthand; many thick notebooks filled with closely written sermon summaries have been preserved. The meeting house rustled with the turning of pages and scratching of pens. Sermons were as pervasive then as political news today; they were read and discussed more eagerly than newspapers are now.
These intellectualized, zealous Massachusetts Bay sermons were celebrated by sermon lovers throughout New England. In these meetinghouses the sermon grew in performance value. And yet the zeal and urgency were viewed as part of the performance.
The tendency remains. Now the zealot is a performer and the sermon a monologue celebrated for its emotional and statistical success. The burden is urgent but also entertaining. The preacher feels the burden of his word as the fire-crier feels the pain of his office. But he feels also the pleasure of its success, which is his reputation.
Ego being the force it is, the urgency of the cry often becomes a secondary theme. Artistry eclipses zeal.
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville tells us of Father Mapple’s sermon on the book of Jonah. Listen to Mapple’s artistic treatment:
Then God spake unto the fish; and from the shuddering cold and blackness of the sea, the whale came breeching up towards the warm and pleasant sun, and all the delights of air and earth; and “vomited out Jonah upon the dry land”; when the word of the Lord came a second time; and Jonah, bruised and beaten—his ears, like two sea-shells, still multitudinously murmuring of the ocean—Jonah did the Almighty’s bidding. And what was that, shipmates? To preach the truth to the face of Falsehood! That was it!
This, shipmates, this is that other lesson; and woe to that pilot of the living God who slights it. Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty! Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale! Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness! Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonour! Yea, woe to him who, as the great Pilot Paul has it, while preaching to others is himself a castaway!
But perhaps Father Mapple’s art can afford to be more obvious than his zeal: he is preaching in a church already there and is not delivering urgency but a sermon on urgency!
How shall we then preach?
For years I have felt myself trapped in this quandary. Growing a church causes me to speak of redemption, frequently and earnestly. My sermons often sound to me too Falwellian or Criswellian or Pattersonian, my sermons more zealous than artistic. It is their intent to draw persons to Christ, in which pursuit my church is engaged.
But you may object, “Is it only sermon that creates your church? Do you not use the manuals and conventional machinery of the church and parachurch?” Yes. There have been mailing programs, and such radio and newspaper ads as we could manage. In fact, has not the sermon become second place in the church? Evangelical Free Church denominational executive Bill Hull once said in a denominational symposium:
Let us candidly confront this chilling claim that the pulpit is no longer the prow of the church, much less of civilization, as Herman Melville visualized it in Moby Dick. Ask any pulpit committee after months of intensive investigation and travel: How many pastors in the Southern Baptist Convention are even trying to build their careers on the centrality of preaching? … Subtle but excruciating pressures are brought to bear on the minister today to spend all of the week feverishly engineering some spectacular scheme designed to draw attention to his church, then on Saturday night to dust off somebody else’s clever sermon outline (semantic gimmickry) for use the next morning.
Is this not so? To some degree, I think it is.
But there are some of us who don’t want it to be. We feel called to do the work of an evangelist and believe urgency can have some class, and be done with some artistry and/or enlightenment. For years I have listened to the sermons of Richard Jackson, pastor at North Phoenix Baptist Church, with great debt to his example. After he finished a long section in the Passion passage of Saint John, I had seen the Cross in a new light. During more than a year of sermons from that Gospel, more than six hundred were added to his church by baptism. Perhaps Pastor Jackson has taken the burden of urgency to the Greek New Testament and the credible commentators and has emerged to say, “Here is enlightened urgency.”
Perhaps Swindoll has done it with certainty. Perhaps Draper did it with Hebrews in his commentary. The sermon by each of these, I believe, is a declaration of urgency that at the same time takes giant strides toward homiletic finesse.
A secular parallel commends itself, again noticed by Bill Hull:
With disaster staring him in the face, Churchill took up the weapon of his adversary and began to do battle with words. From a concrete bomb shelter deep underground, he spoke to the people of Britain not of superiority but of sacrifice, not of conquest but of courage, not of revenge but of renewal. Slowly but surely, Winston Churchill talked England back to life. To beleaguered old men waiting on their rooftops with the buckets of water for the fire bombs to land, to frightened women and children huddled behind sandbags with sirens screaming overhead, to exhausted pilots dodging tracer bullets in the midnight sky, his words not only announced a new dawn but also conveyed the strength to bring it to pass.
No wonder Ruskin described a sermon as “thirty minutes to raise the dead.” That is our awesome assignment: to put into words, in such a way that our hearers will put into deeds, the new day that is ours in Jesus Christ our Lord.
I am not talking about dogmatism. Dogmatism is authority-sclerosis. It is an incessant filibuster—never mute, always deaf! Talking is easier and much louder than thinking. The growing church too often cannot celebrate new truth, for it is too long screaming the old ones. The familiar is the creed; the unfamiliar is liberalism and dangerous revisionism. The thinking person off the street may want to ask questions and enter into dialogue, but he finds that trying to ask a question is like shouting into the gale or trying to quote the flag salute at a rock concert. His need for reasons seems buried in the noise.
I have always applauded Huck Finn for deciding to go with Tom Sawyer to hell than with the fundamentalist Miss Watson to heaven:
Then she told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewhere; all I wanted was a change, I wasn’t particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn’t say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble and wouldn’t do no good.
Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and, she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.
The logic of the streets is doubly plagued by such images. Why would a robust, open-minded Christ so love an overcorseted, dyspeptic, neurotic Scripture quoter as Miss Watson? Hell, for all its fiery disadvantages, seems a quieter and kinder place than her heaven.
It is not that saying “Thus saith the Lord” is wrong, and yet we are all drawn by the counsel of a friend who says, “Let us look together at what the Lord saith!” When we become more authoritarian in dialogues, we need to be sure we are really speaking the mind of God and not merely strong-arming our own agenda in another’s more mighty name.
What matters most
Still, as crass as it sounds, unless the preached word encounters and changes its hearers in some way, artistry and enchantment cannot be said to have mattered much. The sermon must not at last be cute, but life-changing. As Somerset Maugham said of certain writers, “Their flashy effects distract the mind. They destroy their persuasiveness; you would not believe a man was very intent on ploughing a furrow if he carried a hoop with him and jumped through it at every other step.”
When the sermon has reasoned, exhorted, pled, and pontificated; when it has glittered with art and oozed with intrigue; when it has entered into human hearts and broken secular thralldom—when all of this has been done, the sermon must enter into judgment at a high tribunal. Like the speaker who uttered it, the sermon must hear the judgment of the last great auditor. If, indeed, every word is brought to God, one can imagine the last great gathering of the sermons of all ages—the march of the cassettes past the throne. Every word tried … a thousand, thousand sermons—indeed, a great multitude that no man could number: Peter Marshall, Peter the Hermit, Peter the apostle, Peter Piper, Peter Paul, popes, Carl McIntire, Oral Roberts, Robert Bellarmine, John R. Rice, John Newton, John Hus, Prince John—a thousand, thousand words from David Brainerd to Origen, Tertullian to Swaggart, Jack Van Impe to Arius, all at once replying to one issue: Which sermons really counted?
The God who is the ancient lover of sinners will cry to those sermons at his left hand, “Why did you not serve me? Why did not you love men and women enough to change them? You took their hearts, commanded their attention, but did nothing to change them. Be gone, ye cursed sermons, to Gehenna—be burned to ashes and scattered over chaos—for better sermons would have called chaos to unfold itself in strong creation.”
Copyright © 1995 by Leadership/Christianity Today
